Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1887-05-02

ten the merbidity of the world and led a
great many to appreciate the poetry Of
sound health, strong muscles and fresh
| air. Thackeray did grand work in car
| featuring the pretenders to gentility and
high blood. Dickens has built his own
| monument in his books, which are an
everlasting plea for the poor, and the an
athemas Of injustice. Now, say, books
like these, read at right times, and read
in right proportion with other books, can
not help but be enDobling and purifying;
| but alas for the loathsome and impure lit
erstura that has come upon this country in
the shape of novels, like freshet over
moving all the banks of decency and COM
mon sense! They are coming from some
OF the most celebrated publishing houses
OF the country. They are coming
with recommendation of some of our re-
| ligious newspapers. They lie on your
| center table to curse your children, and
blast with
THEIR INTERNAL FIRES
| generations unborn. You find these
books in the desk of the school miss, in
the trunk OF the young man, in the steam
boat cabin, on the table of the hotel re-
ceptiOn room. You see light in your
child's room late at night. You sudden
ly go in and say: "What are you doingP"
81 am reading" "What are YOU read
ing?" ga book" You look at the book;
1t is bad book. "Where did you get it?"
81 borrowed it," Alas, there are always
those abroad who would like to loan your
son or daughter bad book! Everywhere,
everywhere an unclean literature. I
| charge upon it the destruction of ten
| thousand immortal souls, and bid you
this morning wake up to the magnitude
OF the theme. l shall take all the worlds
nterature-good novels and bad, travels
true and false, histories faithful and in
correct, legends beautiful and monstrous,
all tracts, all chronicles, all epilogues,
all family, city, state and national libra
| ries-and pile them up in a pyramid of
literature, and then l shall bring to bear
upon it some grand, glorious, infallible,
unmistakable Christian principles. God
help me to speak with reference to my
last account, and God help you to listen.
charge you, in the first place, to stand
aloof from all books that give false pic
lures of human life. Life is neither a
tragedy nor a farce. Men are not all
either knaves or heroes. Women are
neither angels nor furies. And yet, if you
depended upon much of the literature of
Vic NuJj gOu WOuIu SSI IuG lued LudL IlIGJ
instead Of being something earnest, some
thing practical is fitful and fantastic and
extravagant thing. How poorly prepared
are that young man and woman for the
duties of to-day who spent last night
wading through brilliant passages de-
sCriptiVe of
MAGNIFICENT KNAVERY AND WICK
EDNESS!
The man will be looking all day long for
his heroine, in the tinshop, by the forge, in
the factory, in the cOunting-room, and he
will not find her, and he will be dissatis-
fed. A man who gives himself up to the
indisCriminate reading of novels will be
nerveless, inane and a nuisance. He
will be fit neither for the store, nor the
shop, nor the field. a woman who gives
herself up to the indiscrlminate reading
Of novels will be untitled for the duties
of wife, mother, sister, daughter. There
she IS, hair disheVelled, Countenance
vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling,
hurting into tears at midnight over the
fate Of some unfortunate lover; in the
daytime, when she ought to be busy,
staring by the half hour at nothing; biting
her finger nails into the quick. The
carpet, that was plain before, will be
palmer after having wandered through a
romance all night long in tesselated halls
Of castles. And your Industrious COM
paniOn will be more unettraCtive than
ever, now that you have walked in the
romance through parks with pIumed
Processes, or lounged in the arbOr with
the polished desperate. Q, these con-
firmed novel readers! They are untitled
for this life, which is tremendous dis
Cipline. They know not how to 90
through the furnaces of trial through
which they must pass, and they are I'M
fitted for q world where everything we
gain we achieve by hard, long continuIng,
and exhaustive work.
Again, abstain from all those books
which, while they have some good things
about them. have also an admixture of
evil. You nave read books that had two
elements in them-Jhe good and the bad
Which stuck to you? The bad! The
heart of most people is like
sieve, which lets the small
particles of gold fall through,
but keeps the great cinders.
Once in while there is
MIND LIKE A LOADSTONE,
which, plunged amid steel and brass
tilings, gathers up the steel and repels the
brass. But it is generally just the oppo-
site. If you attempt to plunge through
hedge of burs to get one blackberry you
will get more burs than blackberries.
You cannot afford to read bad book,
however good you are. You say: "The
influence is insignificant" 1 tell you
that the scratch of pin has sometimes
produced the Iockjaw. Alas, if through
curiosity, as many do, you pry into an
evil book, your curiosity is as dangerous
as that of the man who would take
torch into gunpowder mill merely to see
whether it would really blow up or not.
In menagerie in New York man put his
arm through the bars of black leopard's
cage. The animals hide looked SO sleek
and bright and beautiful. He just
strokedsit once. The monster seized
him, and he drew forth hand torn and
mangled and bleeding. o, touch not
evil, even with the faintest strokel
Though 1t may be glossy and beautiful,
touch it not, lestyo pull forth your soul
torn and bleeding under the clutch of the